This is a page I created on my company's Confluence as a way to record my unhappiness with our plan to move our self-hosted solution to AWS
This is a short note to provide a counter argument for the move to Amazon.
I know many of the arguments presented here have been considered and subsequently rejected, but I want to go on the record that at least member of Drift was opposed to the idea.
My main objections can be broken down into four main points. They are in no particular order of importance. There is also no mention of cost here, because I really don’t care.
1. Digital Sovereignty
There is a movement within Europe to migrate away from reliance on US based services and to keep the infrastructure we use with Europe¹. This is a proposal based on both economic and security factors. Microsoft (another company we heavily rely on) has stated that it cannot guarantee data sovereignty to customers in France if asked by the US Government². While they also claim this is unlikely, just this year the USA has shown it is completely unreliable in any sort of international negotiation and Donald Trump has even said that he can't rule out the possibility of declaring war on Denmark³.
2. Single point of failure and lock-in
While AWS touts itself as being a resilient and robust system, it is not impervious to outages. With “AWS Day”⁴ on October 20, 2025 showing how damaging such an outage can be. Just like “Crowdstrike Day”⁵ the Delivery platform was largely unscathed, except in the areas when it interfaces with other affected systems.
While any redundancy can fail, and the Two Colo solution for Delivery is not without its single points of failure. We are in control of these issues and can develop our own mitigation plans, something that is not possible when the infrastructure is outsourced.
But in addition to unintentional failures, we are also at the behest of Amazon itself, and (I hate to keep saying it) the US Government by proxy. If Amazon decides to cut services, increases costs or just generally enshittifies⁶, we have little recourse. We are also stuck in a situation where the USA has effective leverage against the company. While I don't think we are anywhere near important enough to be targeted specifically, they have shown a distaste for any type of diversity initiatives and are not afraid to use their foreign policy in an attempt to enforce their ideology⁷.
3. Environmental cost
This is the hardest to get hard data on and probably the weakest argument against using AWS, but I still think it is an important one. AWS does a big song and dance about it's sustainability and provides many tools for the users to track their own carbon footprint and environmental impact. However it is very difficult to find any data on the environmental impact of AWS datacentres that is not provided by Amazon itself. There is, however, evidence that large datacentres do cause a lot of environmental and community harm⁸.
I personally believe we need to be reducing our compute resources, and having a direct relationship with the hardware keeps us mindful of that connection. We are able to perform our own optimisations and track our own electricity (and to some degree cooling) usage. With large public cloud systems we have to take AWS's word that the numbers they give us are correct, and that they are not doing any environmental accounting tricks to make things look better than they really are.
4. Amazon is a terrible company
To put it bluntly, Amazon has a pretty shitty reputation when it comes to work conditions, from the infamous piss bottles⁹ to overzealous surveillance¹⁰. While corporate AWS workers may be treated better (when they are not getting fired¹¹), I do not make a distinction. If a company treats any of its workers like shit, then that company does not deserve my business.
And yes, I understand this particular argument is probably lost on our upper management, or anyone who sees people as a “resource”.
Also, they are war profiteers¹²…
Conclusion
I just wrote this to get my thoughts together and to keep a record for any future Drifters (though I doubt we will exist as a team for much longer) who may have questions about the move to understand that there were objections to the migration.
- https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/651992/EPRS_BRI(2020)651992_EN.pdf
- https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/microsoft_admits_it_cannot_guarantee/
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gzn48jwz2o
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/business/aws-down-internet-outage.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_outages
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
- https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20250329-trump-diversity-equity-inclusion-dei-france-companies-executive-order-usa-europe-ban
- https://stpp.fordschool.umich.edu/sites/stpp/files/2025-07/stpp-data-centers-2025.pdf
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/delivery-drivers-sue-amazon-for-being-forced-to-pee-in-bottles/
- https://www.dair-institute.org/projects/driven-down/
- https://nypost.com/2025/10/29/business/amazon-fires-staffers-via-text-messages-during-round-of-14k-job-cuts-report/
- https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-out-google-and-amazon-for-abetting-gaza-genocide/en